So you seriously think Linux will own 15% of the desktop market with a YEAR! Do you realize what kind of growth rate that would take? To clue you in, there are somewhere around 300 million copies of Windows out there. Millions of PCs ship every year. Right now, not ONE consumer vendor ships with Linux preinstalled. Not even Dell, which is pretty supportive of Linux, ships Linux on home machines. Eventually Linux might succeed in this market, but not that soon, and not in it's present state.
Second...
Stability: Yes, it's more stable.
Speed: A nominal desktop config with GNOME 1.2, KDE2.0, and XFreee86 4.0 is slower than a comparable WindowsNT machine. Sure you can say, "oh, but with WindowMaker Linux is faster" but then you can't say that Linux has an object model and a good desktop environment. Also, nominally, both GNOME and KDE have to be installed (Gnapster is good, KDevelop is good) which bloats up the system and uses more memory. 3D on WindowsNT is still significantly faster, it seems to handle multimedia better (though I don't have any benchmarks of that) and the system feels much more responsive.
Compactness: How? My super-tweeked Slackware 7.1 config takes up 650MB. 200MB base system, 100-something for X, and with GNOME and KDE installed, 650MB. My comparable Windows NT install with all the little utilities and IE takes up 294MB, plus 150MB for Visual Studio (since I've got KDevelop)=450MB. What were you saying about compact?
Ease of installation: It's only easy if you don't tweek it. I had to recompile XFree86 4.01 (since there aren't Slack packages) I had to manually edit the network config files (to set up NAT and my second ethernet card) I had to edit modules.conf for ALSA, I had to edit XFree86config for the NVIDIA drivers, I had to use xf86config to configure XFree4.0, and I had to recompile the kernel. Aside from recompiling the kernel, my NT configuration is functionally similar, and took much less time and effort.
X: This is an advantage HOW?
IP apps: True, networking is great on Linux.
Empowerment: Empowerment for me is being able to run at the highest frame-rates, render quickest, and have my desktop redraw without flicker. What about you?
Steve Jobs is style over substance. What's your point? It's not about what you like, but what *SELLS* And trust me, Aqua will SELL. It will sell big.
Also, OSX DOES have technical merit. It's got the OO-APIs, and Quartz is genuinely cool. However, since you can't see those, Aqua is needed. Think of it as the visual extension to Quartz.
Would you like to quote where you got the idea Linux will own 15% of the desktop market in a year? I quote from ZDnet
"International Data Corp. predicts a 25% annual
growth rate for Linux into the new millennium"
HOWEVER, same article,
" Linux is making steady
progress on the server side, especially for must-stay-up
installations. But it's making no dent in Windows NT's
growth as the standard OS for departmental servers. And
it is light years away from being a threat to anybody on the desktop."
What you must remember is that it is fairly hard to track the number of desktop users of Linux. Most desktop users tend to download it, compared to corperate users who buy it (for technical support.) Thus, there are not statistics on desktop usage of Linux. However, remember that while Linux is having phenominal growth, that's mainly in the server sector. In the desktop market, distros like Corel Linux and McMillan, and Mandrake are selling poorly (compared to the Windowses.) Also, even BeOS had a home computer with it preinstalled (AST machines.) Even if you see the same for Linux, one preinstall is quite far away from 15% of the market.
Perl is useless if you don't use it. I don't use it, but most distros force you to install it anyway.
1) Would you care to argue that office software point? StarOffice has fewer features and isn't really more stable than MS Office. Who cares if the OS is stable if the office suite is unstable. WordPerfect2K isn't that stable either. Also, in terms of features, MS Office has many things the other two don't expecially for spread sheets and presentations.
2) How do GIMP, Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, iMovie, and 3D Studio MAX relate to games? Please, let me know. These aren't apps that nobody uses you know. I know a lot of (regular) people that fiddle with Truespace SE, or edit images in Photoshop LE. My friends use Fireworks a lot, and all those iMac users use iMovie. Linux has nothing comparable. Linux is weak in games, very weak. And games are a big market for consumer PCs. Linux is still weak in apps too. If you're a desktop user, chances are that Linux apps either don't have all the features you need, or aren't simple enough to use. Most Linux apps are middle-ground type stuff. While GIMP isn't as easy to use as MSPhoto Editor, it doesn't have all the features of Photoshop. If you need the power of either, then you're ass-out. Variety is important. One app doesn't fit everybody's needs. (Yet another reason why all those people making X toolkits should go work on something usefull.) Not to mention the fact that Linux is severely lacking in several software catagories. Notably
A) WYSIWYG editors. Yes they suck, but not everone wants (or needs) to learn HTML.
B) Photo editors. Sure there are image editors, but I don't see anything on Linux that is a good match for that simple stuff that comes with your scanner.
C) Super-high-end apps like 3D Studio, Photoshop, Premiere, SoundForge, Cakewalk, etc, are totally non-existant. Not only that, but no Linux apps have features even comparable to the features of those programs.
D) AOL. Believe it or not, there are 12 million people out there that will never use Linux until it gets AOL.
E) Games. If you took a look at the figures for PC games sales, you wouldn't say that "I'd be happier with a Playstation."
F) Code-generator-type apps. Sure there is a port of Delphi on the way, but I don't see it yet.
G) Need I go on? I'm running out of letters here.
Sure the Linux software lineup meets the needs of a lot of people, but in the specific case we're talking about (read messages in context to their replys, we're talking about whether or not Linux will own 15% of the home market within a year) but for home users, it doesn't.
Linux is not good in the things that are important to home users. Networking and multi-users are decidedly non-important. If Linux were equal to Windows in the other areas, (which I shall enumerate shortly), then multi-user and good networking would be a nice perk. However, it's a small advantage compared to all the disadvantages Linux has.
A) It's still too hard. Unless your computer is blessed by God and happens to jibe with the driver in your distro (how likely is that?) then you still have to do some config work. Also, there are dozens of little annoyances still present. For example, you have to give the IRQs and DMAs of your ISA sound card. You have to recompile the kernel if you want certain features. (It annoys me how many people tell me Linux is easy to use, but say if I want to do some particular thing I should use this or that patch for the kernel.) You don't get gamma controls in X. You can't arbritarily control refresh rate. You often have to live with stuff you don't need (I don't use Sendmail, why the hell does RedHat 6.1 load it by deafault? Before you answer, remember that the solution cannot involve the command line.)
B) It still lacks important software.
C) It really isn't any faster than Windows if you use a reasonable system. Sure WindowMaker may do it for you, but most home users need GNOME and KDE (both for proper app support) and in that configuration, Linux isn't any faster or smoother than NT. It's smoother than Win98, but isn't faster than it. Worse, KDE2 apps take insanely long to startup, even longer than windows explorer with Active Desktop enabled. And I'm talking about a Slackware 7.1 XFree86 4.01 machine here, I'm sure 3.6.x (which comes with most distros) is worse.
D) It's more stable. It's definately more stable. However, many of the important apps are flaky (StarOffice, Netscape) so the stability aspect is somewhat negated.
E) It has much worse hardware support. There is decent 3D acceleration for only a handfull of cards, and even on those cards that are well accelereated (NVIDIA) the Windows version is still faster. Not to mention the fact that there is no support for 3D sound cards or force-feedback joysticks.
Given these things, what's the point of running Linux on a home machine? All you really gain is stability and maybe $90 for not having to upgrade Windows.
I didn't compare BeOS on those criteria. However, notice that I didn't say that 15% of home users would be using BeOS within a year...
However, to be fair, BeOS does still have some advantages over Linux on the desktop. It's faster, and there is some genuinely innovative software for it. However the hardware support is worse, and there is a dearth of apps. Still, it fills my needs, and the needs of many others. I can do most stuff from BeOS, reboting (to NT) only to do rendering, image editing, or DirectX coding. If your needs are simlar to mine, or your needs are very simple and you just need a fast, stable OS that has all the software you need, then give it a try. For a lot of people, who just do simple word processing and play around on the Internet, BeOS makes a great OS. However, if it doesn't fit your needs, then don't use it. I don't proclaim it suitable for the general computing public like many Linux users proclaim Linux is.
Linux definately won't have 15% of the desktop market by next year. Currently it probably has less than 5% and it's growth rate in the desktop market isn't exactly spectacular. Also, Linux currently doesn't offer a tangible advantage to the desktop user.
A) Linux is still lacking some important software catagories. Office software is spotty. Not so much a lack of, but the fact that in general StarOffice and WordPerfect aren't the highest quality applications. The stability of the two are no better than Office, and being just as good as Windows is not good enough. It's also lacking games. As Nintendo will tell you, variety is very important in a game library. Sure Linux has several games, but aside from Quake and UT, the majority of them are older games. Even Descent III is pretty dated. Until Linux get's many "A" titles, it's not going to be a player in the home market. Lastly, there are a severe lack of "best in class" desktop apps in Linux. The whole Office suite is arguably better than WordPerfect (in the database, spreadsheet, and presentation arena, not the word processor) GIMP still doesn't compare to Photoshop, there is still no equivilant for Fireworks or Dreamweaver, 3D Studio MAX still isn't there, etc. Sure all these apps have Linux counterparts, and some of those may be quite good. However, don't think of them as Linux apps, but apps in general. There are a lot of feature and usage issues with Linux apps that Linux diehards usually ignore. Think hard about it. Would Linux apps, if reviewed in a conventional computer magazine, come out with 9's and 10's, or 5's and 6's? Lastly, there is a lack of "simple" software. For example, the iMovie-type software that is so popular. Or basic web-builders like CuteHTML or AOLPress. Stuff that let's ordinary people do basic projects without dealing with a lot of features.
B) The system itself isn't robust enough. Sure it's more stable, but hardware support still sucks. There are only a few 3D graphics cards supported, and poorly at that. (Poorly being defined as not being faster than the Windows versions.) Sound-card support is severly lacking, with half the cool hardware on most modern soundcards being totally unused. That's only if you talk about ALSA. Stuff get's worse with OSS. (A plea, everyone stop programming for OSS. Somethimes a standard just needs to be replaced. Killing OSS and X is like getting rid of ISA. Everyone knows it should be done, but nobody wants to do it.) Then there is the lack of force-feedback support for joysticks. You specifically may not care, but tell that to the guy who spent $200 for his force-feedback wheel. Second, there is no real evidence of what exactly makes Linux better. It's not noticibely faster, it usually takes more harddrive space (a nominal install, you can't get by with Linux without installing GNOME, KDE, and all the useless stuff (for an average desktop user anyway) like Perl, Lisp, Guile, etc.
Sure many of these things will change. However, it will take a lot longer than a year. For Linux to take 15% of the market, it has to be better. Being just as good as Windows is no use. It has to not have any major gaps over Windows and has to totally blow it away in several catagories. Only then will it succeed.
First get all the cool stuff in OS-X into Linux and then the man will have something to sell. For most Mac users, Linux isn't sexy. Useful, powerful, nifty, ethically-correct, but not sexy. Aqua is sexy, Quartz is sexy, Cocoa is sexy. Ext2 is not. X is not. DRI is not. Jobs excels at selling sexy stuff, so I think his powers are wasted on Linux. Seriously though, Jobs kicks ass. My mom is a computer neophyte, and she immediatly wanted to buy the G4 Cube when it came out. He has brought Apple out of bankruptcy and led Apple to make some genuinely cool stuff like the dual-G4 machines. The man is God, pure and simple.
There isn't a +50 karma cap. I think the cap is 100 (though do to various bugs in/. I've got it up to 101. Now, the karma-meter only registers mod-downs and not mod-ups. Don't you just love/.?)
Yea, you can also say that BeOS network performance kicks ass or that it's OpenGL is faster than Windows OpenGL. However, given that those two products are in Beta, they mean nothing until they're actually implemented in the mainstream. Same thing with the eostoric Linux patches. While Ingo's patch may be fine and good, it is really marginal until it is implemented in a production kernel.
True, Truespace 2's interface leaves a little to be desired. However, most of my experiance is with Truespace 3 & 4. They really do have great UIs. It's a little quirky, but for a program in which you'll spend a great deal of time, it's learning curve isn't that bad. The UI is very efficient, and (from my point of view) intuitive. Most of the faux pas that the site mentions (like unlabeled command buttons) are gone in Truespace 4, and in general, the right-click context menus negate most of the problems with hard to find icons. In the end, real world results are what matter. I was able to start using Truespace (2.0 I think) and with no previous graphics experience, I made a little rocket animation within in about 15 minutes. The toolbars become transpant to use, and the whole interface has you concentrating more on your product than the program. The site might not like it, but a lot of people who have used the program extensivly seem to like it, and I suggest you spend some time with it before passing judgement on its interface.
Making something easy != making something less powerful.
Example 1) Maya. Maya has more features than most people will every use. However, it is easy enough for somebody with no graphics experiance to learn it.
Example 2) Photoshop. Photoshop has features that even pro designers can't find a use for. However, it is easy enough for someone to learn to use pretty well in a weekend.
Example 3) Truespace. 3D animation is a very powerful topic. However, Truespace makes it easy to use without limiting its usefullness.
The idea that making something more powerful means making it harder to use is an excuse used by crappy UI designers. The three programs I mentioned above have one thing in common: they gave good, inuitive UIs. Despite their huge power, their interfaces are organized all the features in a consistant way and without making the user feel overwhelmed. For example, the floating tool-palattes of Photoshop and customizable tool-bars of Maya allow you to use exactly the features you need, without feeling boggled by all the options. A bad example of UI design is Blender. Though hot-keys make it pretty efficient, it is no more efficient than Maya, and is infinately harder to use because of it's illogical and inflexible tool layout. Another example is Maya's MEL. It allows you to do complex actions through a language, and then attach those actions to a toolbar icon. This allows the user to use this powerful feature when they are ready too, and by integrating it into the toolbar, hides the complexity of the feature after it is coded. Truespace has another innovation. It extensivly uses context-sensitive right-click menus, thus allowing the user to quickly manipulate items without hunting through toolbars or memorizing hotkeys. These are examples of powerful programs that are fairly easy to use. Methinks that the guy who wrote this article had spent too much time with Blender, and thus his sense of reality was distorted. The bottom line is, that if a user-interface is well designed (even text files, for example, XFree86 4.0's text file UI is well designed, while modules.conf's UI isn't) then the program will be easy to use. However, just as good UI designers can make the hardest program easy to use, bad UI designers can make the simplest programs hard to use.
So you like that fact that you can't watch most Quicktime movies on Linux? If I had said "Fuck Windows Media 4.0" nobody on/. would give a damn. But since Sorenson isn't an MS product, people feel compelled to defend it, regardless of whether it deserves defending. Sorenson is a proprietory compression codec that locks out a good part of the computing population from watching most Quicktime videos.
I've never had an MP3 player skip on me in NT, what's your point? The person I was responding too said nothing about audio latencies. He said that he couldn't listen to an MP3 and surf the internet at the same time with NT. That statement is patently false. True, WindowsNT won't give you millisecond latencies (and neither will regular Linux), but hell, it wasn't designed to. It was designed to be a fast (as in interactive speed) workstation OS, and in that segment, it more or less suceeds.
As for Mp3 playing being implemented under any OS, that's also false. It's not if you can play an MP3 without skipping, but how many you can play, and what load the system will take before it starts skipping. Linux starts skipping at a lot lower load than does NT, which handles a lower load than BeOS. That's just the truth of it. You can totally max you the processors in BeOS and still have the system stay responsive, while doing something proc intensive (like gunzipping the kernel archives, which can fit into main memory) will cause the system to become unresponsive.
Try burning a CD, rendering an animation in 3D Studio, listening to an MP3, surfing with IE, while coding in Visual Studio. I've done it. In fact, I do it several times a week. This is on my 300MHz 128MB PII. NT can handle it. Linux (kernel 2.4-pre7, NVIDIA 0.9-4, Slackware 7.1, XFree86 4.0.1, Gnome 1.2) get's flaky on me when I try to untar the kernel source and surf the net with Netscape at the same time.
Then why the hell is everyone so hostile to KDE! The person I was replying to acts as if KDE linking to Qt violated on of the 10 commandments or something.
Geez. Touchy touch. I know what Sorenson is, I hate it for obvious reasons, and I can't spell it. Knowing how to spell something != knowledge of it, or vice versa.
Sorenson is doesn't work on BeOS, never WILL work on BeOS, and nearly all the internet's MPEGs are encoded in it. Understandably, I am eccstatic (see I probably spelt that wrong as well!) about anything that will help get rid of it. I thought "fuck Sonorson (okay, I spelt it wrong, sue me)" got it across, but apparently you don't seem to understand subtlety (probably spelt THAT wrong as well!)
Let's get something straight. The GPL doesn't prevent Linux from being subject to reality. A sucessful fork of the kernel would be a nearly impossible task. There would be little developer support, it would encourage other forks, etc. Additionally, the Linux project is prone to the same power struggles, ego trips, jockeying that everything else is. If Linux suddenly gave up the project without a clear line of sucession (god damn that sound medieval) then there would be a power struggle. Similarly, the GPL doesn't make Linux imprevious to egos. The bit with Alexander Verio posted in earlier Slashdot stories confirms this. Really, all the GPL makes it easier to do is use the code. Beyond that, you've got the same problems with power and introducing a new OS (forking) that you do with every other project. All it takes is a look to the BSDs' past to prove that OSS is not the "grand unified solution to everything."
That's just pattantly false. I can stream more videos in NT (on my 300MHz 128MB machine) than I can on Linux (which is several less than what I can do on BeOS;) I can keep open a dozen IE5.5 windows while listening to a couple of MP3s. Hell, my normal usage is
1) Listening to an MP3
2) Coding in Visual Studio.
3) Doing graphics in 3D Studio
4) Doing textures in Photoshop.
This is without any skips from the MP3 player!
If my significantly weaker machine can do all that, I have a hard time believing that your 500MHz 256MB machine can't run IE and WinAMP at the same time. Unless you abuse your Windows installation that much, I can't see how it would happen.
Huh? As far as I can recall a good deal of mission critical production quality x86 servers ARE SMP. And you make the assumption that SMP is limited to server tasks. A dual CPU system crunching Photoshop or 3D Studio will have a lot better performance than two interconnected single CPU systems.
FSSA done in hardware vs. software really isn't any different. In the hardware case, the hardware renders the image multiple times, while in the software case, the software instructs the hardware to render the image multiple times (or at a higher resolution or whatever.) However, there really isn't a difference in performance between the two because the software case is just a couple of commands per frame. The difference between the two is one between downsampling from a higher res to rendering multiple times. The benchmarks from Sharky Extreme seem to indicate that GeForce2 peforms better (the GF2 FSSA 4x is almost as fast as V5's 2x) while V5 looks better. I for one, however, can't really tell much of a difference between the two in terms of quality, I think that the extra features and performance of the GF2 is more important than the V5's slightly smoother image. In most cases FSAA is pretty useless anyway, because images rendered at the higher res tend to look better than a FSAA image rendered at low res (or downsampled.) However, I hear that V5's FSAA is really good for flight sims.
Has anybody seen these benchmarks that show V5 beating GeForce2? I have a suspicion that those benchmarks are against the regular GF2 and not the GF2 Ultra. Given the significant perfromance boost, and the fact that 4 VSA100 chips will not be twice as fast as two VSA100 chips, it seems that GeForce2 Ultra may just beat V56K, or at least come damn close. If that's the case, 3DFx has no hope. The V5 is slated to sell at around $600, and with 4 chips and 128MB of (redundant) RAM, I don't see how they can pull the price down. To tell the truh, I'm very pissed of at 3DFx. What used to be the leader of 3D performance and quality has now degraded to making second or third rate products and trying to use market hype to sell it. Not only the sticker fiasco, but their purchase of STB and them artificially keeping Voodoo prices high. There used to be a time when perfromance freaks wouldn't be caught dead without a Voodoo, and all Voodoo2 cards automatically got a "kick ass" award in Boot magazine. Now, a performance freak wouldn't be caught dead WITH a V5 card, and MaximumPC doesn't even bother to review their cards.
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So you seriously think Linux will own 15% of the desktop market with a YEAR! Do you realize what kind of growth rate that would take? To clue you in, there are somewhere around 300 million copies of Windows out there. Millions of PCs ship every year. Right now, not ONE consumer vendor ships with Linux preinstalled. Not even Dell, which is pretty supportive of Linux, ships Linux on home machines. Eventually Linux might succeed in this market, but not that soon, and not in it's present state.
Second...
Stability: Yes, it's more stable.
Speed: A nominal desktop config with GNOME 1.2, KDE2.0, and XFreee86 4.0 is slower than a comparable WindowsNT machine. Sure you can say, "oh, but with WindowMaker Linux is faster" but then you can't say that Linux has an object model and a good desktop environment. Also, nominally, both GNOME and KDE have to be installed (Gnapster is good, KDevelop is good) which bloats up the system and uses more memory. 3D on WindowsNT is still significantly faster, it seems to handle multimedia better (though I don't have any benchmarks of that) and the system feels much more responsive.
Compactness: How? My super-tweeked Slackware 7.1 config takes up 650MB. 200MB base system, 100-something for X, and with GNOME and KDE installed, 650MB. My comparable Windows NT install with all the little utilities and IE takes up 294MB, plus 150MB for Visual Studio (since I've got KDevelop)=450MB. What were you saying about compact?
Ease of installation: It's only easy if you don't tweek it. I had to recompile XFree86 4.01 (since there aren't Slack packages) I had to manually edit the network config files (to set up NAT and my second ethernet card) I had to edit modules.conf for ALSA, I had to edit XFree86config for the NVIDIA drivers, I had to use xf86config to configure XFree4.0, and I had to recompile the kernel. Aside from recompiling the kernel, my NT configuration is functionally similar, and took much less time and effort.
X: This is an advantage HOW?
IP apps: True, networking is great on Linux.
Empowerment: Empowerment for me is being able to run at the highest frame-rates, render quickest, and have my desktop redraw without flicker. What about you?
Steve Jobs is style over substance. What's your point? It's not about what you like, but what *SELLS* And trust me, Aqua will SELL. It will sell big.
Also, OSX DOES have technical merit. It's got the OO-APIs, and Quartz is genuinely cool. However, since you can't see those, Aqua is needed. Think of it as the visual extension to Quartz.
Would you like to quote where you got the idea Linux will own 15% of the desktop market in a year? I quote from ZDnet
"International Data Corp. predicts a 25% annual
growth rate for Linux into the new millennium"
HOWEVER, same article,
" Linux is making steady
progress on the server side, especially for must-stay-up
installations. But it's making no dent in Windows NT's
growth as the standard OS for departmental servers. And
it is light years away from being a threat to anybody on the desktop."
What you must remember is that it is fairly hard to track the number of desktop users of Linux. Most desktop users tend to download it, compared to corperate users who buy it (for technical support.) Thus, there are not statistics on desktop usage of Linux. However, remember that while Linux is having phenominal growth, that's mainly in the server sector. In the desktop market, distros like Corel Linux and McMillan, and Mandrake are selling poorly (compared to the Windowses.) Also, even BeOS had a home computer with it preinstalled (AST machines.) Even if you see the same for Linux, one preinstall is quite far away from 15% of the market.
Perl is useless if you don't use it. I don't use it, but most distros force you to install it anyway.
1) Would you care to argue that office software point? StarOffice has fewer features and isn't really more stable than MS Office. Who cares if the OS is stable if the office suite is unstable. WordPerfect2K isn't that stable either. Also, in terms of features, MS Office has many things the other two don't expecially for spread sheets and presentations.
2) How do GIMP, Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, iMovie, and 3D Studio MAX relate to games? Please, let me know. These aren't apps that nobody uses you know. I know a lot of (regular) people that fiddle with Truespace SE, or edit images in Photoshop LE. My friends use Fireworks a lot, and all those iMac users use iMovie. Linux has nothing comparable. Linux is weak in games, very weak. And games are a big market for consumer PCs. Linux is still weak in apps too. If you're a desktop user, chances are that Linux apps either don't have all the features you need, or aren't simple enough to use. Most Linux apps are middle-ground type stuff. While GIMP isn't as easy to use as MSPhoto Editor, it doesn't have all the features of Photoshop. If you need the power of either, then you're ass-out. Variety is important. One app doesn't fit everybody's needs. (Yet another reason why all those people making X toolkits should go work on something usefull.) Not to mention the fact that Linux is severely lacking in several software catagories. Notably
A) WYSIWYG editors. Yes they suck, but not everone wants (or needs) to learn HTML.
B) Photo editors. Sure there are image editors, but I don't see anything on Linux that is a good match for that simple stuff that comes with your scanner.
C) Super-high-end apps like 3D Studio, Photoshop, Premiere, SoundForge, Cakewalk, etc, are totally non-existant. Not only that, but no Linux apps have features even comparable to the features of those programs.
D) AOL. Believe it or not, there are 12 million people out there that will never use Linux until it gets AOL.
E) Games. If you took a look at the figures for PC games sales, you wouldn't say that "I'd be happier with a Playstation."
F) Code-generator-type apps. Sure there is a port of Delphi on the way, but I don't see it yet.
G) Need I go on? I'm running out of letters here.
Sure the Linux software lineup meets the needs of a lot of people, but in the specific case we're talking about (read messages in context to their replys, we're talking about whether or not Linux will own 15% of the home market within a year) but for home users, it doesn't.
Linux is not good in the things that are important to home users. Networking and multi-users are decidedly non-important. If Linux were equal to Windows in the other areas, (which I shall enumerate shortly), then multi-user and good networking would be a nice perk. However, it's a small advantage compared to all the disadvantages Linux has.
A) It's still too hard. Unless your computer is blessed by God and happens to jibe with the driver in your distro (how likely is that?) then you still have to do some config work. Also, there are dozens of little annoyances still present. For example, you have to give the IRQs and DMAs of your ISA sound card. You have to recompile the kernel if you want certain features. (It annoys me how many people tell me Linux is easy to use, but say if I want to do some particular thing I should use this or that patch for the kernel.) You don't get gamma controls in X. You can't arbritarily control refresh rate. You often have to live with stuff you don't need (I don't use Sendmail, why the hell does RedHat 6.1 load it by deafault? Before you answer, remember that the solution cannot involve the command line.)
B) It still lacks important software.
C) It really isn't any faster than Windows if you use a reasonable system. Sure WindowMaker may do it for you, but most home users need GNOME and KDE (both for proper app support) and in that configuration, Linux isn't any faster or smoother than NT. It's smoother than Win98, but isn't faster than it. Worse, KDE2 apps take insanely long to startup, even longer than windows explorer with Active Desktop enabled. And I'm talking about a Slackware 7.1 XFree86 4.01 machine here, I'm sure 3.6.x (which comes with most distros) is worse.
D) It's more stable. It's definately more stable. However, many of the important apps are flaky (StarOffice, Netscape) so the stability aspect is somewhat negated.
E) It has much worse hardware support. There is decent 3D acceleration for only a handfull of cards, and even on those cards that are well accelereated (NVIDIA) the Windows version is still faster. Not to mention the fact that there is no support for 3D sound cards or force-feedback joysticks.
Given these things, what's the point of running Linux on a home machine? All you really gain is stability and maybe $90 for not having to upgrade Windows.
I didn't compare BeOS on those criteria. However, notice that I didn't say that 15% of home users would be using BeOS within a year...
However, to be fair, BeOS does still have some advantages over Linux on the desktop. It's faster, and there is some genuinely innovative software for it. However the hardware support is worse, and there is a dearth of apps. Still, it fills my needs, and the needs of many others. I can do most stuff from BeOS, reboting (to NT) only to do rendering, image editing, or DirectX coding. If your needs are simlar to mine, or your needs are very simple and you just need a fast, stable OS that has all the software you need, then give it a try. For a lot of people, who just do simple word processing and play around on the Internet, BeOS makes a great OS. However, if it doesn't fit your needs, then don't use it. I don't proclaim it suitable for the general computing public like many Linux users proclaim Linux is.
Linux definately won't have 15% of the desktop market by next year. Currently it probably has less than 5% and it's growth rate in the desktop market isn't exactly spectacular. Also, Linux currently doesn't offer a tangible advantage to the desktop user.
A) Linux is still lacking some important software catagories. Office software is spotty. Not so much a lack of, but the fact that in general StarOffice and WordPerfect aren't the highest quality applications. The stability of the two are no better than Office, and being just as good as Windows is not good enough. It's also lacking games. As Nintendo will tell you, variety is very important in a game library. Sure Linux has several games, but aside from Quake and UT, the majority of them are older games. Even Descent III is pretty dated. Until Linux get's many "A" titles, it's not going to be a player in the home market. Lastly, there are a severe lack of "best in class" desktop apps in Linux. The whole Office suite is arguably better than WordPerfect (in the database, spreadsheet, and presentation arena, not the word processor) GIMP still doesn't compare to Photoshop, there is still no equivilant for Fireworks or Dreamweaver, 3D Studio MAX still isn't there, etc. Sure all these apps have Linux counterparts, and some of those may be quite good. However, don't think of them as Linux apps, but apps in general. There are a lot of feature and usage issues with Linux apps that Linux diehards usually ignore. Think hard about it. Would Linux apps, if reviewed in a conventional computer magazine, come out with 9's and 10's, or 5's and 6's? Lastly, there is a lack of "simple" software. For example, the iMovie-type software that is so popular. Or basic web-builders like CuteHTML or AOLPress. Stuff that let's ordinary people do basic projects without dealing with a lot of features.
B) The system itself isn't robust enough. Sure it's more stable, but hardware support still sucks. There are only a few 3D graphics cards supported, and poorly at that. (Poorly being defined as not being faster than the Windows versions.) Sound-card support is severly lacking, with half the cool hardware on most modern soundcards being totally unused. That's only if you talk about ALSA. Stuff get's worse with OSS. (A plea, everyone stop programming for OSS. Somethimes a standard just needs to be replaced. Killing OSS and X is like getting rid of ISA. Everyone knows it should be done, but nobody wants to do it.) Then there is the lack of force-feedback support for joysticks. You specifically may not care, but tell that to the guy who spent $200 for his force-feedback wheel. Second, there is no real evidence of what exactly makes Linux better. It's not noticibely faster, it usually takes more harddrive space (a nominal install, you can't get by with Linux without installing GNOME, KDE, and all the useless stuff (for an average desktop user anyway) like Perl, Lisp, Guile, etc.
Sure many of these things will change. However, it will take a lot longer than a year. For Linux to take 15% of the market, it has to be better. Being just as good as Windows is no use. It has to not have any major gaps over Windows and has to totally blow it away in several catagories. Only then will it succeed.
First get all the cool stuff in OS-X into Linux and then the man will have something to sell. For most Mac users, Linux isn't sexy. Useful, powerful, nifty, ethically-correct, but not sexy. Aqua is sexy, Quartz is sexy, Cocoa is sexy. Ext2 is not. X is not. DRI is not. Jobs excels at selling sexy stuff, so I think his powers are wasted on Linux. Seriously though, Jobs kicks ass. My mom is a computer neophyte, and she immediatly wanted to buy the G4 Cube when it came out. He has brought Apple out of bankruptcy and led Apple to make some genuinely cool stuff like the dual-G4 machines. The man is God, pure and simple.
Well, think about this pragmatically. All these people porting Linux to silly platforms keeps them from making more GUI toolkits for X.
X toolkits. Bring 'em on. The more the better.
There isn't a +50 karma cap. I think the cap is 100 (though do to various bugs in /. I've got it up to 101. Now, the karma-meter only registers mod-downs and not mod-ups. Don't you just love /.?)
CRISCO? The vegetable oil?
Yea, you can also say that BeOS network performance kicks ass or that it's OpenGL is faster than Windows OpenGL. However, given that those two products are in Beta, they mean nothing until they're actually implemented in the mainstream. Same thing with the eostoric Linux patches. While Ingo's patch may be fine and good, it is really marginal until it is implemented in a production kernel.
True, Truespace 2's interface leaves a little to be desired. However, most of my experiance is with Truespace 3 & 4. They really do have great UIs. It's a little quirky, but for a program in which you'll spend a great deal of time, it's learning curve isn't that bad. The UI is very efficient, and (from my point of view) intuitive. Most of the faux pas that the site mentions (like unlabeled command buttons) are gone in Truespace 4, and in general, the right-click context menus negate most of the problems with hard to find icons. In the end, real world results are what matter. I was able to start using Truespace (2.0 I think) and with no previous graphics experience, I made a little rocket animation within in about 15 minutes. The toolbars become transpant to use, and the whole interface has you concentrating more on your product than the program. The site might not like it, but a lot of people who have used the program extensivly seem to like it, and I suggest you spend some time with it before passing judgement on its interface.
Making something easy != making something less powerful.
Example 1) Maya. Maya has more features than most people will every use. However, it is easy enough for somebody with no graphics experiance to learn it.
Example 2) Photoshop. Photoshop has features that even pro designers can't find a use for. However, it is easy enough for someone to learn to use pretty well in a weekend.
Example 3) Truespace. 3D animation is a very powerful topic. However, Truespace makes it easy to use without limiting its usefullness.
The idea that making something more powerful means making it harder to use is an excuse used by crappy UI designers. The three programs I mentioned above have one thing in common: they gave good, inuitive UIs. Despite their huge power, their interfaces are organized all the features in a consistant way and without making the user feel overwhelmed. For example, the floating tool-palattes of Photoshop and customizable tool-bars of Maya allow you to use exactly the features you need, without feeling boggled by all the options. A bad example of UI design is Blender. Though hot-keys make it pretty efficient, it is no more efficient than Maya, and is infinately harder to use because of it's illogical and inflexible tool layout. Another example is Maya's MEL. It allows you to do complex actions through a language, and then attach those actions to a toolbar icon. This allows the user to use this powerful feature when they are ready too, and by integrating it into the toolbar, hides the complexity of the feature after it is coded. Truespace has another innovation. It extensivly uses context-sensitive right-click menus, thus allowing the user to quickly manipulate items without hunting through toolbars or memorizing hotkeys. These are examples of powerful programs that are fairly easy to use. Methinks that the guy who wrote this article had spent too much time with Blender, and thus his sense of reality was distorted. The bottom line is, that if a user-interface is well designed (even text files, for example, XFree86 4.0's text file UI is well designed, while modules.conf's UI isn't) then the program will be easy to use. However, just as good UI designers can make the hardest program easy to use, bad UI designers can make the simplest programs hard to use.
So you like that fact that you can't watch most Quicktime movies on Linux? If I had said "Fuck Windows Media 4.0" nobody on /. would give a damn. But since Sorenson isn't an MS product, people feel compelled to defend it, regardless of whether it deserves defending. Sorenson is a proprietory compression codec that locks out a good part of the computing population from watching most Quicktime videos.
I've never had an MP3 player skip on me in NT, what's your point? The person I was responding too said nothing about audio latencies. He said that he couldn't listen to an MP3 and surf the internet at the same time with NT. That statement is patently false. True, WindowsNT won't give you millisecond latencies (and neither will regular Linux), but hell, it wasn't designed to. It was designed to be a fast (as in interactive speed) workstation OS, and in that segment, it more or less suceeds.
As for Mp3 playing being implemented under any OS, that's also false. It's not if you can play an MP3 without skipping, but how many you can play, and what load the system will take before it starts skipping. Linux starts skipping at a lot lower load than does NT, which handles a lower load than BeOS. That's just the truth of it. You can totally max you the processors in BeOS and still have the system stay responsive, while doing something proc intensive (like gunzipping the kernel archives, which can fit into main memory) will cause the system to become unresponsive.
Try burning a CD, rendering an animation in 3D Studio, listening to an MP3, surfing with IE, while coding in Visual Studio. I've done it. In fact, I do it several times a week. This is on my 300MHz 128MB PII. NT can handle it. Linux (kernel 2.4-pre7, NVIDIA 0.9-4, Slackware 7.1, XFree86 4.0.1, Gnome 1.2) get's flaky on me when I try to untar the kernel source and surf the net with Netscape at the same time.
Then why the hell is everyone so hostile to KDE! The person I was replying to acts as if KDE linking to Qt violated on of the 10 commandments or something.
Geez. Touchy touch. I know what Sorenson is, I hate it for obvious reasons, and I can't spell it. Knowing how to spell something != knowledge of it, or vice versa.
Sorenson is doesn't work on BeOS, never WILL work on BeOS, and nearly all the internet's MPEGs are encoded in it. Understandably, I am eccstatic (see I probably spelt that wrong as well!) about anything that will help get rid of it. I thought "fuck Sonorson (okay, I spelt it wrong, sue me)" got it across, but apparently you don't seem to understand subtlety (probably spelt THAT wrong as well!)
Let's get something straight. The GPL doesn't prevent Linux from being subject to reality. A sucessful fork of the kernel would be a nearly impossible task. There would be little developer support, it would encourage other forks, etc. Additionally, the Linux project is prone to the same power struggles, ego trips, jockeying that everything else is. If Linux suddenly gave up the project without a clear line of sucession (god damn that sound medieval) then there would be a power struggle. Similarly, the GPL doesn't make Linux imprevious to egos. The bit with Alexander Verio posted in earlier Slashdot stories confirms this. Really, all the GPL makes it easier to do is use the code. Beyond that, you've got the same problems with power and introducing a new OS (forking) that you do with every other project. All it takes is a look to the BSDs' past to prove that OSS is not the "grand unified solution to everything."
That's just pattantly false. I can stream more videos in NT (on my 300MHz 128MB machine) than I can on Linux (which is several less than what I can do on BeOS ;) I can keep open a dozen IE5.5 windows while listening to a couple of MP3s. Hell, my normal usage is
1) Listening to an MP3
2) Coding in Visual Studio.
3) Doing graphics in 3D Studio
4) Doing textures in Photoshop.
This is without any skips from the MP3 player!
If my significantly weaker machine can do all that, I have a hard time believing that your 500MHz 256MB machine can't run IE and WinAMP at the same time. Unless you abuse your Windows installation that much, I can't see how it would happen.
Huh? As far as I can recall a good deal of mission critical production quality x86 servers ARE SMP. And you make the assumption that SMP is limited to server tasks. A dual CPU system crunching Photoshop or 3D Studio will have a lot better performance than two interconnected single CPU systems.
Hard-real time needn't impact stability. Take QNX for example. It is perfectly robust and still hard realtime.
How are you supposed to turn into the premier platform for content and graphics by still using X?
Geez, they broke the GPL with their own code! It's not that much of a sin you know!
FSSA done in hardware vs. software really isn't any different. In the hardware case, the hardware renders the image multiple times, while in the software case, the software instructs the hardware to render the image multiple times (or at a higher resolution or whatever.) However, there really isn't a difference in performance between the two because the software case is just a couple of commands per frame. The difference between the two is one between downsampling from a higher res to rendering multiple times. The benchmarks from Sharky Extreme seem to indicate that GeForce2 peforms better (the GF2 FSSA 4x is almost as fast as V5's 2x) while V5 looks better. I for one, however, can't really tell much of a difference between the two in terms of quality, I think that the extra features and performance of the GF2 is more important than the V5's slightly smoother image. In most cases FSAA is pretty useless anyway, because images rendered at the higher res tend to look better than a FSAA image rendered at low res (or downsampled.) However, I hear that V5's FSAA is really good for flight sims.
Has anybody seen these benchmarks that show V5 beating GeForce2? I have a suspicion that those benchmarks are against the regular GF2 and not the GF2 Ultra. Given the significant perfromance boost, and the fact that 4 VSA100 chips will not be twice as fast as two VSA100 chips, it seems that GeForce2 Ultra may just beat V56K, or at least come damn close. If that's the case, 3DFx has no hope. The V5 is slated to sell at around $600, and with 4 chips and 128MB of (redundant) RAM, I don't see how they can pull the price down. To tell the truh, I'm very pissed of at 3DFx. What used to be the leader of 3D performance and quality has now degraded to making second or third rate products and trying to use market hype to sell it. Not only the sticker fiasco, but their purchase of STB and them artificially keeping Voodoo prices high. There used to be a time when perfromance freaks wouldn't be caught dead without a Voodoo, and all Voodoo2 cards automatically got a "kick ass" award in Boot magazine. Now, a performance freak wouldn't be caught dead WITH a V5 card, and MaximumPC doesn't even bother to review their cards.